The Challenge of “Snowfall At Scale”

The last couple of years has seen a burst of experimentation in the news world to go beyond the print-inherited definition and delivery of news stories/articles/entries. That is genuinely great, but it remains hard, even for leading organizations with vast resources, to scale beyond one-offs. This is due to a mix of interlocked factors, including: CMS constraints coming from strict database schemas and content types, workflow friction, culture, and front-end technology that’s still very much a work in progress.

I plan to cover this more at length in due time, but in the meantime here’s a quick conversation with Elise Hu from NPR and NYT’s Jacob Harris on this very topic:

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“We have a tendency to pour resources into big one-time projects and work through the one-time fixes needed to create them and overlook the less glamorous work of creating tools, templates and permanent fixes that cumulatively can have a bigger impact by saving our digital journalists time and elevating the whole report. We greatly undervalue replicability.”